by Sally Howard
Dimple and I have quite a ride ahead of us: from the heady heights of liberal Hinduism to the shadowy depths of Victorian repression. It’s a road as rutted and variegated as the terrain we’ll cross, from the hilly Himalayan north to the plains of the east; from the sultry south to the throbbing twenty-first-century metropolis of Bombay, on the western coast of the Arabian Sea. My eye alights on the auto’s dashboard where, next to plastic Chinese flowers and a depiction of a many-armed Kali, hangs a keychain, much like the ones the hawkers were trying to sell us earlier. As we bounce up and down on the auto’s clapped-out suspension, I watch in fascination as the keyring, featuring a mechanised miniature cock and vagina, thrusts suggestively in and out of itself, with an elegant staccato rhythm.
2 | THE RAGING RAJ, Shimla
Ours was a one-sexed society, with women hanging onto the edges … Some chased polo balls and some chased partridge. Some took up the most unlikely hobbies, and some went to diseased harlots … and some married in haste, only to worry over who was seducing their wives in the hill stations where they had seduced so many other people’s wives.
—Lieutenant Colonel John Masters on life in the British Army in the 1930s
It says here that it’s a myth. The Victorians never dressed their indecent piano legs with little skirts,’ I say.
Dimple and I are puffing uphill to the old hill station of Shimla on the Shivalik Deluxe. As Indian trains go, the Deluxe is luxurious: furnished with deep velvet cushioned seats and that more acquired taste, piped Hindi pop music. The train is celebrated by rail enthusiasts for what lies beneath us: a rare narrow-gauge rail track that was a feat of engineering in its day. It scissors through the sedimentary rocks of the Lower Himalaya, across treetops and precipitous drops and 1500 feet of elevation, to the summer capital of the Raj.
I’ve caught the Deluxe a few times now and it’s become my favourite train route among India’s many. For the non-trainspotter, it’s the view that gets you: every window filled with pine- and cedar-clad panoramas; and up ahead of us now, tumbling down the hillside like an illustration in a book of fairytales, the mock Tudor and Scottish baronial rooftops so characteristic of Shimla.
When we’re not distracted by the view, we’re reading up on the period in India’s sexual history that we’re here to explore. We’d started discussing the thesis for Shimla at Kalka railway station, amid the crush of bags and bodies that heralds every Indian train departure.
‘The Victorians are every Briton’s symbolic parents,’ I’d informed Dimple. ‘In a way, every British generation since has rebelled against their prudishness. So what I want to know is, is this the same for Indians?’
‘They may be disapproving parents to you, but to Indians they’re more like evil step-parents,’ Dimple had replied, as we arrayed ourselves on padded seats, opposite a chattering Punjabi family. ‘We love what the Britishers gave us in terms of democracy, cucumber sandwiches and English tailoring, but we hate what they took away from us: the labour of our people and our natural resources. So we’re nostalgic about them in a way, but they’re also the baddies. You can get a sense of that from Bollywood.’
She’s right. From the 1960s on, the British became the stock baddies in Bollywood; like, perhaps, the Germans to Hollywood. The 1985 movie Mard, starring the demi-god of Bollywood, Amitabh Bachchan, is typical of the focus. In one scene, loosely based on the Jallianwala Bagh or Amritsar massacre of 1913 – when Brigadier-General Reginald E.H. Dyer ordered 50 Gurkha riflemen to fire into a crowd who’d assembled, in peaceful protest, in contravention of a British ban on public gatherings – an actor playing Lord Curzon, with a vainglorious glint in his eye, orders two mounted machine guns to open fire on the group of corralled ‘natives’.
‘The sexy piano/table legs thing,’ I continue. ‘Apparently it came from a parody of prudish Americans, written by a British naval man and novelist, Frederick Marryat.’
I’m reading from a webpage I’d downloaded when we last had a flicker of wi-fi access, back on the Kalka plains.
‘That so?’ says Dimple. ‘I thought ankles were a big turn-on for the Britishers; that nice ladies didn’t show them, and so on.’
‘That was certainly true,’ I continue, lowering my voice as a chai-wallah makes one of his 20 or so journeys up and down the carpeted aisle. He grimaces as he and his cargo are buffeted by air pressure when we enter the first of 104 tunnels we’ll pass through during our five-hour journey up into the hills. ‘Girls didn’t show their ankles getting into carriages, or at least the boring girls didn’t. In fact, even the word “legs” was thought to be too crude. The correct word was “limbs”.’
‘Good girls covered up their legs and bad boys got to wear metal chaddis?’
Dimple smirks. We’d just been poring over another internet quarry: a line drawing of the Stephenson Spermatic Truss. A metal hood dangling from a studded belt, this was a late nineteenth-century anti-masturbation device that permitted the wearer’s penis to move freely until it became erect, whereupon its pressure against the metal hood would generate an electrical current.
The truss was one of around 30 anti-masturbation devices trademarked during the latter half of the British Empire, when the morally crusading Purity Campaigners were at their height. Masturbation – an act portrayed as a potential moral catastrophe and a cause of degeneration for the upcoming generation of upright empire builders – was one of their main targets. Dr William Acton, who wrote extensively on the subject, advised cold baths and quoits as prophylactics, though he schooled against horse riding. Inventors and entrepreneurs rushed into the field, offering everything from ‘erection alarms’ to anti-masturbation tonics.
Such devices, as well as other strange nineteenth-century exhibitions of sexual prudery, have since become cartoon-ishly synonymous in the West with the era we’re here to explore: the Victorian and Edwardian age to the British, to Indians the Raj.
The Raj, British suzerainty over India, pertained for 90 years. It gave Britain the wealth that built its Victorian cities; it supplied its swagger and self-made men, as well as its tea, opium, saltpetre, cottons and silks. In return, it gave India its legal and bureaucratic framework, its sports and botanical gardens, and a railway system that remains the largest employer in the world.
Eventually, the British endeavour in India would carve off great hunks from the Indian subcontinent, provoking bloody communal massacres and inciting animosities that rumble on today, 60 years after India gained her independence. And Britain’s intimate relationship with India would make its mark on both nations’ sexual ethics – and sexual appetites.
Sexual dynamics underpinned the Victorian British Empire and its successful expansion. Indeed, the growth of the British Empire was as much powered by ‘copulation and concubinage’, as Cambridge historian Dr Ronald Hyam puts it, as it was by ‘Christianity and commerce’.
For Victorians suffering a restriction of sexual freedoms at home, India’s concubines, eunuchs and lotus-eyed ladies would prove unsettling and, for many, irresistible. In the early days of the twentieth century, the incidence of venereal disease among the army at home in Britain was 40 soldiers per 1000, whereas in India it was 110 per 1000. In 1887, a correspondent to the Pall Mall Gazette spoke for many when he bemoaned the tendency of colonial administrators to form ‘immoral’ relations in India, leaving their values back home ‘along with Crosse and Blackwell’s pickles or Keen’s mustard’.
Back in Britain, the thirst for both a real and an imagined Oriental sensuality had taken hold. Despite newly toothy obscenity laws, Britain devoured India’s literary erotica and, under its influence, would create oil-painted tableaux of harems and naked odalisques. For India, the racist undercurrents of the Raj would give shape to a character that already existed in Indian art and spiritual tradition: the white-skinned goddess, untouchable but, in the equivocal form of the colonial memsahib, also suddenly very much flesh and blood – ginger hair, freckles and all.
For British men stati
oned in India, the creation of the Empire provided exuberant possibilities for sexual experimentation. As another Cambridge historian, Roy Porter, put it, ‘For many English travellers, exotic parts and peoples were realizations of fantasies, sources of sexual or mystical discovery, havens for scoundrels and screwballs, ways of jumping the rails of Western Classical-Christian Civilization.’
In Shimla, Dimple and I are staying at Wildflower Hall, a property that’s now a luxury hotel, but was once the stately pile of a man who embodies Shimla’s reputation for sexual heterodoxy: Herbert, First Earl Kitchener. In this fine alpine setting, Kitchener is remembered as the ‘Jhungi Lat Sahib’ or great warlord. He was the Commander-In-Chief of India from 1902 to 1909, though in the West he is most famous today as the army general behind the First World War enlistment campaign ‘Your Country Needs You’.
Kitchener’s delight in interior furnishing and horticulture, not least as seen at Wildflower Hall, led contemporary correspondents to comment ‘It is an open secret that the commander-in-chief is an enthusiastic gardener’, a phrase with a euphemistic flavour that resonates today.
In North Africa, as contemporary journalist Patrick Barkham put it, Kitchener had acquired the ‘officer’s failing… a taste for buggery’; and in Shimla, Kitchener maintained a habit from his days in Egypt of surrounding himself with an eager bunch of unmarried officers he nicknamed ‘Kitchener’s happy band of boys’.
Another take on his sexual taste comes from historian A.N. Wilson. ‘When the great field marshal stayed in aristocratic houses,’ Wilson said in the 2009 BBC documentary The Victorians, ‘the well-informed young would ask servants to sleep across their bedroom threshold to impede his entrance. Kitchener’s compulsive objective was sodomy, irrespective of gender.’
Kitchener also had no use for married men on his staff, cultivated a great interest in Robert Baden-Powell’s Boy Scout moment, avoided interviews with women wherever possible and decorated his rose garden at Shimla with bronze sculptures of naked boys.
Other historians suggest that Kitchener’s passion for boys – pederasty in contemporary parlance – was unconsum-mated, his pleasure coming chiefly from ‘scopophilia’ or the act of gazing at the young, naked male form. In Kitchener’s time, such interests were far from marginal. Until the 1930s, popular culture continued to support a strong emotional interest in young boys. Artistically suspect ‘Uranian poets’ flourished throughout the Edwardian period, conjuring purple stanzas celebrating ‘splendid strapping boys’ and ‘forbidden lips’. And male-oriented men, as we’ll see later, soon found an outlet on Indian soil.
Kitchener wasn’t the only one up to mischief in Shimla’s foothills; far from it. From the earliest days of its position as the summer capital of the Raj, it became a place for British men, including convalescing and holidaying soldiers, to enjoy a spot of restorative ‘jiggy-jig’, and one where the sexual ethics in operation on the Indian plains, and certainly back home in Britain, were temporarily suspended.
In 1890, Diwan Jeewan Das, Minister of the Raja of Kapurthala, summed up the atmosphere at Shimla as most people saw it: a place where ‘gaiety, frivolity and sex indulgence’ reigned. That was a far cry from the public morality of buttoned-up, pinned-down Victorian Britain.
The following morning, Dimple and I are bouncing downhill on the back seat of an Ambassador cab. We’re with Raaja Chopra, a historian who’s spent his career researching the larger-than-life characters who peopled Shimla during its 80 years as the Raj summer capital. Raaja has arranged for us to be dropped at the lower edge of town, at Cart Road, to take in a little of the atmosphere of Shimla present, as we consider the excesses of Shimla past. Today it’s Karva Chauth, a festival in which local women fast through daylight hours for the well-being of their sons, fiancés and husbands, so the city’s zigzagging alleyways are packed.
From the veg carts and taxi stands of Cart Road, it’s a lively 20-minute walk, via a warren of bazaars, to the Ridge, the focal point of this hillside city since the days of the Raj. A hawker pushes a platter of milk-based sweets under our noses, and Dimple sniffs luxuriantly.
‘The bazaar has followed this layout since the early Britishers were here, so the atmosphere would have been much the same,’ says Raaja. ‘But then they were selling perfumes from Paris, silk gloves and tropical corsets, too; and the shoppers would probably be on jampans, on an Indian’s shoulders. This was a boomtown, you have to remember. A fifth of the word’s population was ruled through Shimla’s two telegraph wires – a fifth!’
The hawkers are doing a brisk trade in bangles, ribbons and votive candies. ‘Tonight women will exchange gifts and dress up in bright sarees and shalwars,’ Raaja explains. ‘As I see it, Karva Chauth is as much about the women treating themselves as a gesture to the town’s menfolk.’
We’re here to find out about another group of spunky women associated with Shimla. In its British Indian heyday, the city was awash all summer long with the cream of British Indian society in pursuit of their frivolities and indulgences, but one societal subgroup became more notorious than most.
‘The Grass Widows were wives of Raj officials who were spending the summer in Shimla while their husbands remained on the plains.’ Raaja continues the conversation we’d started in the cab. ‘Grass was probably a reference to the fresher mountain air. These women were famous for their sexual escapades. They earned themselves nicknames: the “Charpoy Cobra”, charpoy being a traditional woven bed; the “Subaltern’s Guide”, named for her taste for subalterns or junior officers; the “Bed-and-Breakfast”, who explains herself; and my own personal favourite, the “Passionate Haystack”.’
The idea of the predatory older woman first arrived in modern popular Western culture in the 1967 movie The Graduate, in which rudderless university graduate Kevin Braddock (played by Dustin Hoffman) is famously seduced by bored older housewife Mrs Robinson (played by Anne Bancroft). In that common celluloid distortion, Bancroft was in fact only six years Hoffman’s senior. Perhaps it was because the romantic pairing of a powerful older woman and a subordinate younger man in a climate in which fewer than 40 per cent of women participated in the labour force was rare, but there was a marked lack of judgemental comment on Mrs Robinson’s motivations.
By the twenty-first century, however, the predatory older woman was not considered so innocuous, picking up her notorious feline alias the ‘cougar’, as well as a tougher edge. In American television depictions, such as Desperate Housewives and the Courtney Cox vehicle Cougar Town, she’s a plastic predator, cosmetically improved to within an inch of her eyebrow line, and the arch consumer of both luxury footwear and men. Bloodlusty, but somehow bloodless, in many ways she’s the daughter of that stock 1980s figure, the power-dressing businesswoman.
‘Not everyone was happy about these predatory older women during the Raj,’ continues Raaja. ‘I have something here that will give you an idea.’ With this, he pulls us away from the crowds, into an alcove next to a hole-in-the-wall bangle store. He extracts a small wad of papers from his belted suit trousers.
It’s a 1913 cutting about the Grass Widows from a local publication, lampooning the ‘seasoned spinsters and speculating mammas’, and the latters’ complaint that the Grass Widows are ‘collecting and enticing away all the eligible bachelors from the unmarried generation’.
‘So there was less a moral complaint about the Grass Widows’ antics, more one claiming territorial rights over unmarried men?’ I ask Raaja, the insight surprising me.
‘That’s right,’ he replies, ‘and we see the tension elsewhere in society too. Look at this, a Rudyard Kipling poem, “My Rival”. It was written in 1885, by which point Kipling had spent many summers in Shimla and had seen these antics at first hand. The poem’s the lament of a Fishing Fleet girl, a British woman who’d come to India in search of a husband, that the older Grass Widows are ruining her chances with Shimla’s eligible bachelors.’
The young men come, the young men go
Eac
h pink and white and neat,
She’s older than their mothers,
But they grovel at Her feet.
They walk beside Her ’rickshaw wheels –
None ever walk by mine;
And that’s because I’m seventeen
And She is forty-nine.
I wish I had Her constant cheek;
I wish that I could sing
All sorts of funny little songs,
Not quite the proper thing.
I’m very gauche and very shy,
Her jokes aren’t in my line;
And, worst of all, I’m seventeen
While She is forty-nine.
‘You know, there was another thing,’ adds Raaja, neatly folding his sheath of cuttings. ‘Sex with a Grass Widow could be a career move for a young captain. There was a clear relationship between being spotted – perhaps as a handsome young officer playing amateur dramatics on the stage at the Shimla Gaiety Theatre – and achieving preferment and promotion. Numerous young men were skilled in manipulating bored women to their advantage in this way. They were nicknamed poodle-fakers, poodle being slang for a silly woman.’
Sex is the oldest route to preferment, of course. The Kama Sutra emphasises married women with powerful husbands as an appropriate subject for a citizen’s sexual attentions:
The woman has gained the heart of her great and powerful husband, and exercises a mastery over him, who is a friend of my enemy; if, therefore, she becomes united with me, she will cause her husband to abandon my enemy. (Burton translation, 1883)
We settle down over white tablecloths, scones and tea in the vaulted tearoom of one of the heritage hotels that anchor the Mall. Around us, well-fed European, Indian and American tourists clink heavy silver tableware and chat reverently or uproariously according to national stereotype. The property is now owned by a five-star brand that made its fortune, so the gossip goes, supplying beds by the hour to Raj soldiers and prostitutes in early twentieth-century Calcutta.
